MTU Resources

"For a youth with no other hope in a system that excludes them, the gang becomes their corporation, college, religion, and life. It is in this reality that gang members go to the extreme with tattoos. I now have 'Eight Trays' written across my neck and 'Crips' on my chest. Ever see George Bush with 'Republican' on his chest or 'Capitalist' on his neck?

Ethics, technology, U.S. Copyright Law, and hip hop culture and music combine to provide us with a timely opportunity to explore the techniques and broader implications of digital music sampling. As the U.S. Court of Appeals has recently noted, “advances in technologycoupled with the advent of the popularity of hip hop or rap music have made instances of digital sampling extremely common and have spawned a plethora of copyright disputes and litigation.”

Our academic, scholarly, creative, and technical work across disciplines — at the university, in professional life, and in our communities, in everyday life — is increasingly linked to intellectual property concerns, and we will develop a learning unit together to explore the challenges and opportunities in copyright and fair use contexts that you can use in this course and in your other work. For example, we will consider Paul Butler’s “Much Respect: Toward a Hip-Hop Theory of Punishment” (Stanford Law Review) in the context of criminal justice before applying it to contemporary issues in digital music sampling. The issues that arise in these discussions will undoubtedly appear again in your experiences downloading digital materials online, copying course materials, sharing music, and when incorporating sources into your own work.

Remixes, mashups, fan tributes and other creative work burgeoning in online video often use copyrighted material without permission or payment. When is it fair to do so? In many cases, creators can employ fair use, a key feature of copyright law. Welcome to a code of best practices in fair use for online video, and to studies and other information that help you understand the importance of fair use in maintaining an open door for tomorrow’s creativity. For deeper resources, including teaching materials, background on the law, video examples of fair use in action, and other codes of practice, go to centerforsocialmedia.org/fairuse.